[Talk-GB] addr:place cleanup process

[Tony Shield]

Hi

Moving into the discussion space of the address levels above? street.

Suburb works for many locales, but what about towns, parishes and 
villages and hamlets?

I can best illustrate by my practice where  live in Chorley, Lancashire 
- a Borough Council area

Chorley is a postal town, but that fits well with addr:city,

There are 23 civil parishes most centred around a village - so 
addr:village for most of them; but several of the Western parishes have 
Leyland as their postal town - does not cause too much confusion as the 
villages are prominent enough.

Withnell Parish is large and has three villages and one hamlet - each 
with a strong Identity - so addr:village and addr:hamlet work well.

Chorley Town is unparished, but has several areas which are regarded as 
suburbs - so addr:suburb works well.

A major oddity is Buckshaw Village - a new housing estate from the old 
Ordnance Factory (a very large factory 376 Ha) - which has elements in 
Chorley Town, Whittle-le-Woods Parish, Euxton Parish and South Ribble 
council. It straddles the Leyland and Chorley post towns. I tend to use 
add:village=Buckshaw Village - local custom -  and the correct postal 
town, but some areas are marked by Royal Mail as Euxton, others as 
Buckshaw Village even though they are in Whittle-le-Woods - No Consistency.

The result of this usage is that local identity is preserved, it 
(mostly) conforms with local government administrative organisation and 
most importantly provides a followable address which is human readable 
and will take a person closer to the location by reading a printed OSM.

It follows that changing addr:place to addr:suburb can often be wrong - 
I know I have used place incorrectly for villages and hamlets ( I am 
correcting these).

Unparished areas may require different ideas and suburb may appropriate 
- but I think the local rules for each area need to be defined. I see 
that Chorley has an OSM wiki page - so if there is agreement I shall 
write the above in there.

Tony


On 13/01/2022 23:51, Rob Nickerson wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As we learnt the other week, the addr:place tag has often been 
> incorrectly used here in the UK. The tag addr:place is meant to be 
> used when the address does _not_ reference a street (tagged with 
> addr:street) at all. This is frequently seen in small villages in 
> continental Europe which often don't have any street names at all.
>
> In the UK most cases of addr:place and addr:street being used together 
> are incorrect and are cases where addr:suburb should have been used 
> instead of addr:place. You can browse the Nominatim QA 
> <https://nominatim.org/qa/#map=8.06/53.26/-0.64&layer=addr_place_and_street> 
> to find examples and help clean these up.
>
> To help with this clean up effort I have tested an approach in JOSM 
> that some might consider as captured by the Automated Edits code of 
> conduct. I therefore wanted to share this process before proceeding.
>
> Step 1:
> Identify a potentially incorrect use of the addr:place tag. To do this 
> I am looking at the list of values used on TagInfo GB and checking if 
> any of these are villages/towns. If they are then there is a high 
> chance that the addr:place tag is incorrect.
> https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/keys/addr%3Aplace#values
>
> Step 2:
> Open the data in JOSM using an overpass query. An example query I am 
> using to download the data is:
>
> [out:xml][timeout:90];
> {{geocodeArea:England}}->.searchArea;
> (
>   nwr["addr:place"="Eccleston"](area.searchArea);
> );
> (._;>;);
> out meta;
>
> Step 3:
> Inspect the data in JOSM paying particular attention to other addr:* 
> tags. To do this I start by doing a Ctrl+F and search for e.g. 
> "addr:place"="Eccleston". This selects all the features with this tag. 
> I can then see the full range of addr:* tags used on these features. 
> High use of addr:street reiterates the incorrect use of addr:place. I 
> can also see if the addr:suburb tag has been used on any features -> 
> if it has then I go investigate this separately. I also investigate 
> uses of all other addr tags except housenumber/name, unit, flats and 
> street.
>
> Step 4
> Change addr:place to add:suburb. I get to this stage quicker if step 3 
> does not identify any conflicting addr:* tags (e.g. if the only other 
> addr tags are housenumber/name and street). The more addr:* tags there 
> are the more I look into individual OSM features before making this 
> change.
>
> As always, if in doubt then I don't proceed.
>
> How do you feel about this sort of approach? With proper time spent 
> carefully looking at the other addr tags that have been used, then I 
> believe it is a low risk edit.
>
> P.S. Feel free to check out the results of a couple trials I made. 
> e.g. 
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/116122672#map=14/53.6500/-2.7281 
> I'll pause on making more as I realise I should get the discussion 
> going first.
>
> Thank you,
> *Rob*
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org
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